Ida KarBohemian Photographer, 1908 – 1974 has just opened at the National Portrait Gallery and runs until 19 June. Although I missed the press view last week, there’s plenty of time to see the show and get familiar with Kar’s work as I know little of it. Tomorrow, the Association of Photographers announces the judges for three of its competitions and on Wednesday night the winner and runners up for the Student Photographer of the Year 2010. And finally, j’arrive. I’m there at 100 women photographers featured in Hotshoe magazine and space for so many more.

NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY – IDA KAR
This will be the first museum exhibition for 50 years devoted to Ida Kar and includes nearly 100 photographs, some not previously exhibited.

This exhibition of portraits by the twentieth-century pioneering photographer Ida Kar “highlights the crucial role played by this key woman photographer at the heart of the creative avant-garde. With striking portraits of artists such as Henry Moore, Georges Braque, Gino Severini and Bridget Riley, and writers such as Iris Murdoch and Jean-Paul Sartre, this exhibition offers a fascinating insight into the cultural life of post-war Britain and an opportunity to see iconic works, and others not previously exhibited”.

“Russian-born, of Armenian heritage, Ida Kar (1908–74) was instrumental in encouraging the acceptance of photography as a fine art when, in 1960, she became the first photographer to be honoured with a major retrospective in London, at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. She later continued to document conceptualist artists such as Gustav Metzger and John Latham and life in Cuba and Moscow. Featuring unseen archive material, this reappraisal provides a valuable record of the international art world as documented by Kar over three decades while literary subjects exhibited include Doris Lessing, Colin MacInnes and T S Eliot.”

I am the editor of Frame and Reference, an online visual arts magazine for the South East; editor-at-large of Hotshoe, a bimonthly contemporary photography magazine; and co-founder of Tri-pod, a creative initiative supporting lens-based artists with personal projects in process.
The Roaming Eye is curated by Miranda Gavin. All views are my own.

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